The Circum-Alpine Culture Area: A Preliminary View

Culturally distinguishable an several important counts from both the Mediterranean region to the south and the European Plain to the north, the Alpine zone constitutes a discrete culture area. Although a great deal of internal diversity is obviously present-in the form of numerous ethnic, national, linguistic, and religious distinctions-the various provinces of the uplands are nevertheless unified by several persistent underlying cultural patterns, the distribution of which corresponds more or less closely to the mountain zone as physiographically and ecologically defined. The characteristics emphasizing cultural homogeneity within the region bear upon basic subsistence practices, land tenure and technology, forms of occupational specialization, distinctive aspects of social structure at the level of the local peasant community and the larger cantonal district, and certain associated cultural values logically consistent with the overall configuration of structure and custom. Examined as a set, moreover, these patterns suggest that the Alpine area is a region of cultural climax. The upland mode of life represents an ultimate of sorts, a combination of traits selectively acquired and retained from neolithic times to the present, a complex, stable, finely integrated pattern that has emerged as the end product of a long-term process of evolutionary adjustment covering a period of some four thousand years. The purpose of this paper, as an exploratory effort, is to establish the approximate extent of the Circum-Alpine culture area, to examine briefly the concepts on which its definition rests, and to describe in some detail a series of major institutions and culture patterns which, in combination, appear to characterize the region and give it unity. In the final analysis, it is an attempt to portray a particular sector of Europe and a form of European culture